Overview

The second annual conference of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: “Processes of Globalization under the Global Condition” focuses on the role of actors and their activities in making and changing spaces of action under the global condition in both the past and the present. The conference is part of a larger endeavour of the SFB 1199 at the University of Leipzig to develop a typology of those spatial formats that have emerged under the global condition as well as a historical narrative about the development of spatial orders. The conference addresses practices and processes through which – relatively durable – spatial arrangements are created, maintained, and subverted. By studying global space-making, we move beyond abstract notions of flow and exchange to examine the spatial arrangements that direct and organize flows, determine their speed and scale, and produce interruptions or continuations. Through this lens, “globalization” becomes visible in the plural as a multiplicity of projects of space- and place-making.

The conference brings together international scholars from different disciplines such as geography, anthropology, history, and the social sciences as well as specialists on different world regions interested in transregional entanglements. Addressing both German and international academia, it represents one of the key arenas in which the research programme of the SFB can be discussed with a wider and interdisciplinary academic community.

If you are interested in participating in the conference or wish to receive further information, please contact Dr. Steffi Marung (marung@uni-leipzig.de) or Dr. Ute Rietdorf (sfb1199@uni-leipzig.de)

Wolfgang Zimmermann (Leipzig, Germany), Spatial arrangements of nomadic actors and their variation under global conditions. Results of empirical research in Musandam/Sultanate of Oman in the mid 1970s and today

Diana Ayeh (U Leipzig, Germany), The role of CSR agents in shaping dominant notions of multinational corporations in Burkina Faso

Hannes Warnecke-Berger (U Leipzig, Germany), From revolutionaries to economic development agents? The making of a transnational economic space in El Salvador, the US, and West Germany

Comment: Martin Müller (U Lausanne, Switzerland)

Coffee Break

12:00 pm – 1:30 pmConcluding Roundtable

Chair: Ursula Rao (U Leipzig, Germany)

Maren Möhring (U Leipzig, Germany)

Geert Castryck (U Leipzig, Germany)

Sarah Sippel (U Leipzig, Germany)

Matthias Middell (U Leipzig, Germany)

1:30 pm Farewell Lunch

Abstracts

Panel 1: Infrastructures (of) Making Space

Chair: Uwe Müller (U Leipzig, Germany)

Ursula Rao (U Leipzig, Germany), Biometric technology and the re-spatializing of the Indian welfare state

The Indian welfare system has a bad name. It is criticized for bad targeting, inefficiency, and corruption. There is the worry that it does not effectively protect citizens from extreme poverty and the state from scrupulous citizens who exploit the system for personal gain. Biometric technology is the newest invention introduced to improve welfare delivery and cut costs. It promises to provide forgery-free identification of citizens at anytime and anywhere. This will aid in protecting states from imposters and fake identities while also rendering welfare distribution more flexible and adapted to the living circumstances of the labor class. Economies of survival in India are often predicated on movement of people between the multiple homes of their extended family. To earn sufficiently and support each other, family members move to the city for work, education or medical treatment and regularly travel back to the village for long periods to assist during sowing or harvesting or supporting relatives during birth and death. Precarious living conditions in the city often force people to shift homes frequently. Governing such mobile population provides huge challenges for the Indian states, especially since its administrative systems presuppose settled citizens with permanent addresses. In order to receive welfare payments, citizens must provide evidence of permanent addresses. After shifting or during travel verification of identity or withdrawal of benefit become real problems. How might the introduction of biometric technology influence this process? A focus on spatializing practices provides a privileged lens for understanding the complex effects of a difficult reform. Globally biometric governance is used for and associated with the efficient organization of flows at ubiquitous portals. In turn, welfare distribution is linked to statistical governance operationalized through the channels of the vertically integrated state. Using the case study of a new mobile Health Insurance distributed to people living below the poverty line, the article analyzes the clash between two concepts of governance and the compromises that creates points of conjunction. Rather than moving from one to another spatial regime, reform produces a layering of techniques of governance, which imposes particular kinds of mobilities on welfare citizens.

Arne Harms (U Leipzig, Germany), Situating offsets: On spatializations of climate finance in the Indian Himalayas

As the world is warming, climate finance has come to be seen as a bedrock of attempts to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. This paper looks at climate finance from the ground up. It uses two particular salient forms of climate finance – afforestation and hydroelectric power generation – as lenses to capture climate finance’s impact on everyday life in the Global South. Widely dubbed India’s ‘green state’ or ‘hydro-power state’, the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh has seen a plethora of initiatives aiming at tapping into the resources made available by climate finance. At present, the state is dotted with small scale afforestation projects and small to medium scale hydroelectric plants implemented by state agencies, international donors, public-private partnerships and corporations harnessing climate finance. Based on ethnographic research in project sites, offices and among critical social movements, this paper traces several registers of spatialization underpinning, and set forth, by climate finance. It argues a) that Himachal Pradesh’s leading role within India’s green economy is related to entrenched imaginations of the state as a space where development works and nature is intact enough to be invested in. It goes on to argue that b) climate finance enters into, and comes to be enmeshed with, a complex pattern of spatial ordering and governance. In due process, bureaucratic legibilities, local administrations and customary rights are bound together with, and come to bear upon, material conditions and technological interventions. Finally, the paper argues that (c) this complex pattern opens up novel spaces of action for involved actors as they negotiate and contest emerging figurations.

Germany has recently been known for its relatively low numbers of deceased organ donors of about 10,6 donors per million population (pmp), while Spain, in contrast, has boldly proclaimed to increase their already high donation rates slightly to beyond 40 donors pmp. While most professionals may refer to the 2012-transplantation scandal in Germany or different systems of consent to explain the difference, a comparative perspective across various European countries can illuminate a multitude of other important factors. However, neither is there a fixed set of factors that can serve as a determinant for organ donation, nor do these factors – despite the often nationally bound systems of regulation – obey national borders. Instead, organ donation as a medical procedure and contested societal practice emerges from an heterogeneous ensemble of entities such as individual and public opinions, legal frameworks, biographies and regional/national (hi)stories, sedimented practices, spatial and non-spatial imaginations, funding practices, personal networks of knowledge, cooperation and conflict, legal, semi-legal and illegal practices as well as situational affects. Following the concept of assemblage, we argue that for every act of consenting to organ donation, different factors can be of importance while – in other cases – these factors may play completely different roles. Elaborating factors for organ donation rates therefore aims at investigating and comparing decisions as well as understanding the regulatory and de-facto practices involved. The presentation will map the factors of different organ donation rates in general and explain on which spatial and temporal scales these factors exist. We will explain basic cornerstones and practices in organ donation and transplantation and highlight the complex web of individual, local, regional, national and international social entities that play a role in influencing opinions on and decisions about donating organs. For example, individual experiences with organ donation in one’s biography as well as religiously informed burial practices may play a role. Institutional working environments may help or prevent nurses and clinicians from reporting potential donors. Regional autonomy movements may overlap nationally organised donation and allocation regimes in a way that regional donation rates may be significantly lowered. National regulation regimes can (or maybe do not) introduce allocation procedures informed principles of equity. Transnationally organised religious groups may introduce encouraging guidelines for their followers while local archipelagos (see Wilford 2010) of faith may resist any form of influence regarding their position towards organ donation. Our presentation will (1) provide an overview over numerous factors in Europe and (2) elaborate how these factors may influence each other. Based on the concept of assemblage, we aim at dissecting the different arrangements of these factors in different countries, for which the specific factors (e.g. religion, history, laws) can have different (sometimes conflictive) effects on donation rates. (3) We will discuss two ways spatiality emerges: On the one hand, we will highlight examples of how spatial imaginations explicitly inform practices and regulations in organ donation and allocation. On the other hand, we will show how the complex web of factors may contradict intentional spatializations in the field and form the basis of different emerging spatializations. We draw on first hand data based on interviews from numerous European countries with surgeons, nurses, organ recipients, donor families, patient’s organizations, professional associations, members of religious groups and administrative bodies. Furthermore, we will incorporate existing scientific and public studies on determinants of organ donation in order to contextualize our findings in prevalent medical debates and with regard to the regional focus of our study.

Comment: Dirk van Laak (U Leipzig, Germany)

Panel 2: Changing (Post)colonial Geographies

Chair: Steffi Marung (U Leipzig, Germany)

Matthew David Unangst (Washington State U, USA), Appropriating the hinterland: The Indian Ocean world and German colonial geographies

The basis for the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference’s settlement was the so-called “Hinterland Theory,” promoted by Germany. The “Hinterland Theory,” as German diplomats argued it, was that a nation’s colonial claims on a coast should extend into the interior along the same lines of latitude. Hinterland, in its original meaning, was crucial to European imaginaries of world geography in which value derived from trade with Europe. Critical scholars in recent decades have deployed the concept of hinterland when writing about maritime cultures. It has been particularly important in framing the scholarship on the “Indian Ocean World.” Hinterland as an idea holds promise, some scholars argue, as a means of decolonizing European colonial geographies and reappropriating spaces claimed in European colonial conquests for alternative geographical imaginaries. I argue that this project has served to reinforce colonial geographies of Africa, as it reproduces a geography of the continent in which the interior’s value is tied to trade with the coast. The Indian Ocean World geography, however, is not the same as the European colonial geography. It is rather a reconstruction of the geographical imaginary of Arab and Indian merchants on the Swahili Coast of today’s Tanzania and Kenya. As detailed by historians like Norman Bennett and Abdul Sheriff, these merchants attempted to create a commercial empire in Eastern Africa, stretching to the Congo Basin. When German colonialists claimed that same territory for Germany, they came into conflict with these earlier claims. In the 1880s and 1890s, German colonialists appealed to histories of trade in the Indian Ocean dating back to antiquity to argue for coastal control of the interior. The result was a perspective on East African history that made coastal control of the interior seem natural. Histories of colonization in East Africa became increasingly important to the German project in East Africa. Those histories and maps served to make the gatekeeper state appear unavoidable and German control of the gatekeeper state a part of the natural process of East African history. Of course, most people in East Africa subscribed to neither German nor Swahili geographies of the region. Actors at the edges of legal domains, or who crossed legal borders, challenged the workings of the German colonial state, particularly around property ownership. African actors undermined the German appropriation of space in East Africa and made German geographies fit into their own geographical imaginaries. The German appropriation of East African space could only work through extreme violence. This paper looks at the ways in which these alternative geographic imaginaries came together in East Africa for a better understanding of spatial appropriation in the colonial context along two axes, the conflict and resolution of European and Indian Ocean geographies through the creation of a colonial gatekeeper state based on the control of hinterland, and for the ways in which this process was contested. Such thinking, I argue, will help us think beyond hinterland and the Indian Ocean World, itself a colonial appropriation of space, for ways of challenging colonial geographic imaginaries.

The paper deals with the practices employed by Romanian party officials, journalists, and healthcare experts in order to translate and appropriate decolonized space in Africa. I argue that Guinea’s transformation into a “dreamworld” through the discovery of the postcolonial (as self-determination and social-economic progress or as medical emancipation and liberation from disease) is also a story about Romania’s self-discovery within post-1960 Cold War hierarchies. By dreamworld I understand the set of policies and narratives that resulted from Romanian bilateralism with Guinea. Such conceptualization encompasses the political aspects of the regime’s presence in Western Africa and the micro-histories of the people involved in this encounter. I focus on the following types of actors who produce knowledge about Guinea: party leadership, journalists, and doctors. These individuals represent three discourses about the postcolonial: official, popularizing, and the professional one. These cases stand out because their narratives were based on direct, peripatetic contact with Guinea and its people. Their representations are simultaneously epistemic, symbolic, and geographic. During the sixties, Guinea stands out as a trial run for Romania’s engagement with newly independent Sub-Saharan states in terms of political reciprocity as well technical assistance provided (in health care, education, printing, geology, etc). This relationship is a case-study of how Romania’s presence in Africa triggered the re-signification of the country’s place within postwar spatial orders. The characteristics of Guinea as Romanian dreamworld reflect the regime’s imagination of a global order based on mutually advantageous, counter-hegemonic bilateralism between small and medium-sized countries – an alternative to peripherializations engineered by great powers.

Wolfgang Zimmermann (Leipzig, Germany), Spatial arrangements of nomadic actors and their variation under global conditions. Results of empirical research in Musandam/Sultanate of Oman in the mid 1970s and today

This study examines the spatial arrangements of nomadic actors in the Musandam Peninsula at two points in time whereupon two different groups will be analysed: families of mobile fishermen (ahl al bahr) and of mobile mountain dwellers (badu). Both groups formed in the 1970s almost half of the total population of Musandam. Profile 1 is in the 1970s and concentrates on the regional mobility behaviour of the nomadic actors. Regional mobility means seasonal family migrations between two or three settlements and economic locations. In addition, the settlement behaviour (home making) in the coastal oases as a spatial result of regional mobility will be analysed. Profile 2 is the situation of today, forty years later. Both groups are now sedentary. New sites of residence are central places in Musandam or nearby Emirates. Nevertheless, the ancestral places on the coast and in the mountains are not abandoned. They have converted into secondary homes, which are visited frequently even if families expatriated. The seasonal mobility has changed into commuting movements creating a new spatial mobility behavior. The starting point for the transformation of the spatial behavior of nomadic actors in Musandam was in the late 1960s. It was the time of nation building in SE-Arabia, which resulted in the foundation of the United Arab Emirates (1971) and the validation of the Sultanate of Oman (1970). The basis of the state formation was by drawing up of frontiers between these two new states, which also established two Omani exclaves, Madha and the Musandam Peninsula, both surrounded by, and bordering with the new UAE. Moreover, the rapid rise of a modern globally influenced economic development fuelled by oil money especially in the nearby Emirates and the high demand for labor and in particular, national Arab labor, in combination with education opportunities, attracted the “nomadic actors” to start a change process. This finally let to voluntary sedentarisation and new forms of work giving up the traditional modes of economy in particular mountain grain agriculture. Fishing still plays a certain role as it generates significant income.

Comment: Dmitri van den Bersselaar (U Leipzig, Germany)

Panel 3: Evading the State, Challenging Territorial Orders

During the last decade social scientists have shown a growing interest in studying squatting phenomena. A renewal is given with the developing conceptualization of the « right to the city » (droit à la ville) that Henri Lefebvre exposed in his eponymous book published in 1967. While Herbert Marcuse declared the end of utopia in the same year, his son Peter recently commented Lefebvre’s theory as a quest for utopia that takes place in the current struggles against gentrification, homelessness and social exclusion. Even in 1967, Michel Foucault introduced with the concept of heterotopia a way to understand abstract realities, while Guy Debord argued for the realisation of utopias here and now. David Harvey links the spatial requirements from Lefebvre’s concept with the necessity of creating spaces of hope. Edward Soja speaks about spatial justice. In the words of squatters these concepts are everywhere. Their discourse is full of arguments theorizing the solution they’re opening to change the urban dilemma : How to provide a shelter to everybody ? Squatting is a way of appropriating space. This means not only how to arrange a place to make it fit but also how to accomplish the ultimate goal pursued. In many cases people are not squatting only to solve individual housing problems. Squatting might be seen as one principle of a bigger plan, as one aspect of a movement oriented to play the social trial of neoliberal urbanity. Squatters seem to focus both on the protection of their home (« sweet squatted home ») and « the local ». Squatters from everywhere are defending quite the same neighbourhood. Squatting movements are acting global for social justice at their local level. Considering the case of France the history of squatting shows a very heterogeneous complexity of groups and ideologies fighting for this and defending that. It might be impossible to speak about squatting as a singular form of human behaviour. In the broader sense squatting might be justified as the consequence of an unequal economic system. It might be seen as an attempt to make society better by including its margins. In the aftermath of the Second World War a social catholic organisation developed the bases of the French squatting movement. This form of action turning empty spaces to meaningful places is one central aspect of social urban movements after 1968. People travelling from European cities came to Paris and discussed the possibilities that squatting might open to resist the urban destruction projected by housing promoters. Squatters from Paris were looking at the dimensions of the movements in other countries. With this communication my purpose is to review some aspects of the French (Parisian) squatting scenes through the lens of the different spatial dimensions they occupy. It is based on previous research about the history of squatting and aims to discuss the continuum of a controversial social action. One leading question of this study may be formulated as follows : How do squatters deal with the paradigm of spatial justice reclaimed with the right to the city ?

Tine Hanrieder (WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany), Global health in the United States: The making of a de-territorialized medical South

This paper advances a professional geography approach to understanding the formation of a new field of transnational practice, Global Health. I argue that the growth of this field does not merely indicate an intensification of North-South intervention. It is also a professional project creating de-territorialized humanitarian spaces as its jurisdiction. I focus on a central site of meaning making, the emerging didactic regime for Global Health in US medical education. Through the de-territorialized “global” lessons that students are taught in poor countries, but increasingly also in precarious settings at home, the jurisdiction of Global Health is re-territorialized as a Global Medical South stretching into the US. The analysis is based on a content analysis of university websites and didactic handbooks and a sample of 64 articles evaluating the education effects of study abroad experiences. It reveals an emerging canon of Global Health virtues and the construction of domestic scales for Global Health practices through which the humanitarian registers of compassion, sacrifice, and triage become applicable at home as well as abroad. This analysis of professional projects as spatial projects contributes to the “global IR” endeavor to understand the shifting meaning of center and periphery, and of inequality in global politics.

Gang intervention programs in cities with high prevalence of gang-related crimes have been always challenging and problematic. Since the 80s large cities like Los Angeles California or Washington D.C. have relied on different models, including a legal initiative named “gang injunctions”, or a judicial order enforced by the police that prevents people identified as gang members from congregating in public spaces within a certain area and that creates additional restrictions on otherwise legal activities. Injunctions are strictly territorial, and because of that a legal cartography emerged to map “hot zones” where the civil law applies differently to any gang members. Almost since the beginning, Latino organizations in those cities reacted against that model to point out that instead of bringing security, injunctions may have created a negative effect in the community. When aggressive stop-and-search techniques are used unfairly against Latino youth in these zones, tension and distrust start to happen between the community and the police. At the same time, gang members not just may reinforce their affiliation but are pushed to transform their tactics: they become less visible and more difficult to find. Since 2009, the City of Los Angeles funded a new initiative called “Gang Reduction and Youth Development” (GRYD), this program intended to be a new approach to intervene gang-related violence. Although also strictly territorial, this program distances itself from the gang injunctions because it developed a series of innovative strategies focused on increased municipal services and engage the community in the creation of safe spaces in places with high prevalence of gang violence. Although an important part of the GRYD strategy is focused on youth at risk of gang involvement, the program also intends to reduce gang commitment between some of the gang active members. Since their start, the City of Los Angeles has claimed that this program has reduced homicides in general but also gang-related homicides from 1,097 in 1997 to 298 in 2003 where fifty percent are gang-related homicides for each case. Based on the 2017 fieldwork in the cities of Los Angeles and Washington DC. conducting interviews with different key actors of the gang phenomenon, this paper discusses the different ways in which the legal cartographies of gang injunctions are renegotiated by different actors of the GRYD program. This discussion becomes more relevant when the data collected during the interview revealed that at least half of the personnel working in each of the GRYD units around the city of Los Angeles are former gang members. This case brings back the discussion of the importance of considering gang members not only to explain the rise of crime and violence in specific cities but also to study the importance of incorporating gangs in the development of successful models that seek to reduce gang violence. Overall, the analysis of the gang injunctions is relevant because it allows to visualize the complexity of those living and working under spaces that operates under two different territorial logic: one that enforces banned spaces and the other that promotes safe spaces for all.

Comment: Nils Zurawski (U Hamburg, Germany)

Panel 4: Reorganizing Transnational and International Spaces

Jan Botha (U Stellenbosch, South Africa), Higher Education leaders grappling with the notion of “World Class Universities” in the context of Global Forces in Higher Education

The impact of six global forces on higher education, and in particular on institutional research (IR) in higher education, is discussed in this paper, namely massification, globalisation, the development of the knowledge society, the development of information and communications technology, the development of an audit culture with enhanced requirements for accountability and the increased levels of competition (manifested in particular by the global rankings of universities). Due to the impact of these global forces, the rationale for Institutional Research (IR) has deepened and the stakes have raised, the scope of IR has broadened and deepened, and the volume of data and information and the capability to use large volumes of data have increased significantly. The availability of high quality IR is critical for all universities, and even more so for universities striving to be “World Class Universities” (WCUs). However, higher education institutions (HEIs) are not merely the passive recipients (or victims) of the impact of global forces. Through their knowledge contributions and the provision of education at advanced levels HEIs are important role players – and co-creators – of these global forces. When the emergence and increasing influence of global rankings of universities is considered, the role of higher education leaders to legitimize and (inadvertently) enhance the impact and importance of the global rankings can be demonstrated with reference to their strategic decisions and major policy statements and speeches.

Since the late 19th century privately endowed philanthropic foundations have expanded their activities within the national boundaries of many Western democracies. During the course of this expansion, an increasing share of foundations adopted transformative agendas: Instead of simply financing charitable purposes they try to change social structures for what they consider as societal improvement. Since the end of the Cold War and with the most recent boost of foundations at the outset of the 21st century, many large foundations have started to transcend national borders by universalizing and globalizing their transformative agendas – the respective buzzwords are philanthrocapitalism, millennial philanthropy, philanthro-policymaking, effective altruism etc. Drawing on an empirical case study – the ‘100 Resilient Cities’-program pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation –, we reconstruct and analyse how and why the Rockefeller Foundation decides, acts, and talks the way it does. Metaphorically spoken, we will show how the foundation as a particular organization “paint[s] their own scenery, observe[s] it through binoculars, and [tries] to find a path through the landscape“ (Weick 1979, 136). This means first of all that foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation are inclined to pick up problems and solutions that qualify as “boundary objects” (Star and Griesamer 1989) – resilience in the present case. Secondly, foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation base their global governance strongly on the communication mode of interactions defined as a social situation of co-presence. Thirdly, they try to provoke strong behavioural commitments among the donees. Ultimately, all these strategies aim at the generation of legitimacy. If foundations or their programs fail to be perceived as legitimate actors with legitimate solutions, they will not be able to achieve any of their transformative goals. However, if they manage to do so, as can be seen in the ‘100 Resilient Cities’ program, they will be able to trigger collectively binding decisions, or, more critically, to lever the democratic principle of ‘one man, one vote’. In sum, our case study and its theorization will show that and how a particular institution of the West has become global and how foundations act globally and locally at the same time.

In the aftermath of mass violence, post-conflict societies and the international community aim to reckon with the conflict and prevent it in the future. There has been extensive scholarship on international criminal tribunals in the aftermath of war, particularly the complex relationship between prosecutions and peace.1 This research considers the legal rationales upon which international criminal tribunals are based and the ensuing precedents they create. However, there has been less attention paid to international criminal tribunals as interventions that create spaces for global (in)action related to mass violence. In this paper, I examine the ways that transitional justice activities entail space-making practices and processes in their efforts. I argue for attention to the ways in which transitional justice practices constitute spatial regimes that organize, regulate, and order people’s engagement in the aftermath of conflict. Building on the limited extant research engaging spatial aspects of international criminal tribunals, I consider how they generate transnational spaces of inclusion and exclusion, both for the conflicts they address and the wider international community. In doing so, I show how transitional justice processes create spaces that authorize particular audiences for their work. Further, these temporary processes entrench enduring spatial orders, as well as the discursive legacies and legal precedents created by their work, which in turn impact the communities where they are located. Finally, the creation of post-war international criminal tribunals are transnational processes including judges, lawyers, and support personnel from numerous countries, as well as defendants and witnesses from the conflict, both from that country and others. While international criminal tribunals have a narrow scope, their space-making practices engage many actors from around the globe and create broad international precedent to address future conflicts. In this paper, I consider the Special Court for Sierra Leone as a space-making process. This paper builds on and reflects ethnographic research methods that attend to issues of space and mobility related to postconflict transitional justice (Cole, forthcoming). To do this, I examine its location and citing in Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown, the architecture and design of the Special Court itself (including its chamber, jail, perimeter, and the prosecution of Liberian leader Charles Taylor in the Hague), as well as the physical negotiation of the Special Court complex by stakeholders, both Sierra Leonean and foreign, during and after the Court’s work. Based on a close reading of the Special Court’s physical structures, I argue that the spaces made by the Court prioritized the international community, rather than ordinary Sierra Leoneans, in its work. The Court’s practices as a transnational transitional justice institution inhibited its ability to enact justice and build peace locally in Sierra Leone, while constituting international actors and law as the proper audiences of its work.

Comment: Elisabeth Kaske (U Leipzig, Germany)

Panel 5: Narrating Space

Most Americans associate the concept of the frontier with the western half of the U.S. nation. However, there was an earlier frontier of Euro-American expansion that involves white settlers, African slaves and Native Indians. The frontier in Florida was a contested space between various European powers: Florida was Spanish until 1763, then British, then Spanish again, its disputed northwestern border was claimed by both Spain and France. Finally the peninsula became American by annexation and purchase between 1800 and 1821. As a spatial nexus of the domestic and the foreign, situated between the U.S. and the Caribbean, the peninsula played a crucial role in the debates resulting from the conflict between centrifugal and centripetal forces, i.e. those forces endorsing the consolidation of the nation v. those arguing for further expansion. While its soils were considered largely useless, Florida was regarded as an important final step to establish full control of the Gulf Coast and to complete the ‘rounding out of American dominions’” (Wasserman). Moreover, southern slave-owners pressed for control of Florida as they kept losing slaves who crossed the border into Spanish territory. In texts about Florida – travel narratives, captivity tales, stories, and memoirs – this frontier has been constructed in very disparate ways. While some highly popularized captivity narratives presented Floridian space as a “desert” or wilderness, emphasizing its distance from civilization, others detailed the horrors of Indian violence against whites at the Florida frontier, serving as instruments of expansionist politics and justifying General Andrew Jackson’s cross-border incursions into Spanish Florida. Other texts presented the peninsula as a safe haven for escaped slaves from U.S. plantations or as a way station on their flight to the British Bahamas; yet others praised it as a tropical paradise and a pastoral. The paper will discuss the contrasting spatializations of the Florida frontier and of the peninsula in the texts as well as the agendas underlying these constructions in the context of Critical and Hemispheric Regionalism. It aims at exploring the multitude of spatial constructions of Florida in antebellum literature as an expression of different spatial imaginations and projected spatial orders. Moreover, it will contrast these antebellum texts to the body of texts emerging after the “closing” of the Florida frontier in the 1860s and 1870s: adventure stories, dime novels and tourist guides that signal the region’s transformation into a domesticated and commercialized space.

Spatial conceptualizations of world regions are (re)produced by diverse groups of different actors. The profound transnationalization in the higher education context represents one example where spatial configurations are constantly challenged in at least a two-fold sense. First of all scholars of Higher education institutions (HEIs) continuously refine discourses and discussions about transcending borders and spatial configuration of the world. Secondly by physically transcending borders and by setting-up transnational co-operations stakeholders of HEIs also influence in practical terms processes of transnationalization. These stakeholders may comprise besides academics, also administrative staff of the university as well as its students and applicants. In the paper a closer look on the latter group, the applicants for a specific Master programme will be taken. This programme is offered in Global Studies, a field in which spatial constellations are intensively reflected. It represents a transnational projects itself since it is based on a transnational cooperation between currently 12 universities around the world. In the presentation insides into the spatial references used by the applicants in their motivation letters will be given. Applicants for the programme encompass in principle nationals from around the world. The majority of them originate however from Europe and Asia. The applicants, which are on average in their mid-twenties when applying, hold at minimum a Bachelor degree or equivalent in Social Sciences and Humanities. A very common discipline studied is Political Science. In order to be able to answer the question to which spatial contexts these applicants make reference in their motivations letters a special grid needed to be developed. This grid served as a basis for decoding the content of the letters and for comparing the same. With the help of the content extracted the following questions are among others to be addressed: Which (different) spatial logics do applicants use in their letters, namely do they embed their narrations in rather local, national, transregional or global contexts? Do applicants narrate about their region of origin? Do they (also) refer to further regions? Do they only narrate about physically experienced regions or also about regions they have not (yet) visited? The investigations will not be limited to a general analysis of the spatial references made by the applicants. Instead, it will be traced, if there occur difference in the spatial mentioning’s, that are e.g. based on the regional origin of the applicant. It will thus be possible to make some judgements, if in the concrete case study, practices of space-narrating differ according to the regional origin of the actors? The presentation will thus also shed light on the conferences overall questions on: How people are integrated (or more concretely feel themselves integrated) into spatial arrangements in the framework of projects with a global reach? It will also touch the question, if there are distinctions between perceived spaces and experienced spaces?

Comment: Maren Möhring (U Leipzig, Germany)

Panel 6: Creating Economic Spaces

This paper starts out with an overview of how the existing research literature on the emergence and transnational expansion of commercial popular entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries deals with the question of space. Studies on the development of modern entertainment industries have generally placed these processes in contexts of urbanization, nationalization, empire-building and globalization, but tended to treat them separately. While more recently, attention has increasingly been drawn to the fact that a variety of spatial frameworks impacted modern mass culture, their interaction has not been conceptualized in a systematic manner. Against this background, the paper reflects on ways to unravel the entanglements between urban mass culture, national entertainment industries, imperial circulations and transnational networks of commercial culture. To that end, the paper follows a shift in the debate about the history of popular entertainment by focusing on economic actors and on the production side: on the entrepreneurs, brokers and managers of entertainments and on the ways they established networks of production and distribution as well as new cultural genres that made commercial entertainments suitable for wider expansion and circulation. Drawing on some examples of historical actors in the entertainment business, the paper argues that one of their basic challenges was to find a working balance between the requirements and opportunities of different arenas and scopes of action that constantly impinged upon both their day-to-day business activities and their larger strategic operations. These processes become tangible with a closer look not at these actors individually or at spatial orders generally, but at the particular, multi-level production and distribution regimes these actors have built. These include specific business models and territories, regulatory frameworks, and efforts to align business structures and marketing activities with the content and aesthetics of the cultural offers.

At the end of the Russian civil war, the Soviet government was confronted with the challenge of how to reorder the territorial structure inherited by the Russian Empire. Therefore, the Bolsheviks tried to find a feasible way to territorialise “Soviet space”, which should in a longer communist perspective encompass the whole world. Within the state and party apparatus, there were two competing tendencies. On the one side, Gosplan – the State Planning Committee – sought to order the Soviet space according to transnational economic characteristics. On the other, Lenin and other party leaders had promised national self-determination. The national actors were insisting on this promise. In my paper I analyse the discourse around these two rivalling tendencies up to 1929, when Stalin ordered its stop. However, the result of this discourse highly influenced the basic territorial structure of the Soviet state, which endured until 1991. The borders drawn in the 1920s between the union republics became basically the lines alongside which the USSR broke apart. The term space is used as the basis of my analysis. I conceive it as a product of social interaction like territory. Whereas space itself is something diffuse and vague (like Eastern Europe), territory is something clearly defined by boundaries authoritative for all involved actors (like a football field). In line with David Delaney, the latter “cannot be considered apart from two fundamental aspects of human social being: meaning and power and the contingency of their relationship.” Territorialisation is the result of socio-political processes that form an order within a certain space and time. In the end of these processes borders define what or who is inside and what or who is outside a certain territory. In the Soviet case, borders had a decisive impact on language, taxes and education as well as career opportunities. Relying on archival documents of the state and party administration as well as Gosplan, I analyse the discourse of territorialisation, its participants (party leadership, experts from Gosplan, national elites, local population), its effects and ways of subverting the new order. During the 1920s, the transnational economic concepts were defeated by the supporters of the national idea. However, the arguments developed by Gosplan highly influenced the way of general argumentation. Many participants from the national republics adopted the economical terminology provided by Gosplan. Referring to Stalin’s famous statement that the Soviet state should be national in form but socialist in content. I argue that the territorialisation of the Soviet space was national in form but economic in content.

Diana Ayeh (U Leipzig, Germany), The role of CSR agents in shaping dominant notions of multinational corporations in Burkina Faso

Large-scale mining activities of multinational corporations on the African continent are often associated with a high degree of technical sophistication and of socio-spatial isolation from neighboring communities. James Ferguson shows that in recent years investment has been concentrated in privately secured enclaves, which are characterized by “social thinness”. However, the simple analysis of industrial gold mining companies as “entities” and “black boxes” which are emerging in and actively contributing to the establishment of “mineral enclaves” does not always match the complex makeup of subsidiary locations in emergent large-scale gold producing countries such as Burkina Faso. In an attempt to challenge some of the conventional notions about the presence of multinational corporations in the Global South, the paper examines who enacts and “personates” the mine on a local level and how these enactments take place in the course of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs and practices. Working at the interface between company and community interests, it is argued that CSR agents are permanently acting within, between and upon different places and localities – mainly “the mine” and “the community”. They are not only physically transgressing corporate boundaries on a daily basis, but are permanently confronted to challenges in terms of identification, representation and loyalty. It is assumed that their subjective perception of landscapes is much less structured by binary concepts of “the corporate enclave” or “the local community”. Instead, CSR agents often encounter a feeling of “being out of place”. However, the paper shows that the inner workings of CSR departments are, likewise other corporate structures, highly demarcated by social and racial hierarchies that have effects on degrees of local engagement of individual employees. Based on several months of ethnographic field research in southwestern Burkina Faso, the paper addresses the role of CSR agents in “disenclaving” multinational corporations.

Hannes Warnecke-Berger (U Leipzig, Germany), From revolutionaries to economic development agents? The making of a transnational economic space in El Salvador, the US, and West Germany

The paper starts from a twofold observation: On the one hand, the failed revolution and the subsequent civil war in El Salvador gave rise to a large body of literature focusing on the autochthonous dimensions of the political conflict of the 1980s. On the other hand, contemporaneous authors, economists and social scientists alike, are highlighting the “new” causes of an emerging transnational economic space induced by migration and remittances. In this paper, I contest both bodies of literature. Instead, I argue that the nowadays-evolving transnational economic space has its roots in the 1980s and particularly in the formation of the revolutionary left. The paper argues that each of the five different guerrilla groups that eventually unified in the FMLN already maintained transnational relations towards the US as well as West Germany that were used to organize political and ideological support as well as and to provoke donations and for fundraising for weapons. Churches, political parties, NGOs, newspapers, and social movements in these countries of the Global North often functioned as counterparts for the revolutionary movement in El Salvador. After the end of the civil war in El Salvador in 1992 and the arising experiences of disappointment of the factual end of real existing socialism as well the dissolution of an ideological alternative as a sine qua non condition for the revolutionary movement, the Salvadoran guerrilla transformed into a leftist political party finally accepting the socio-political status quo. Instead of dissolving, however, many counterparts of the former revolutionary movement continued their work although on a pure economic basis. Many activists formed hometown associations or development NGOs that are today used to capture remittances and channel migradollars into “development”. In retracing the trajectory of these development agents and their politico-ideological antecedents, I argue that the contemporary transnational remittances economy and its institutional setting has to be understood as an outcome of a transnational political space. While the Central American crisis of the 1980s opened ideological space for rethinking political alternatives beyond national boundaries, the establishment of “Peace” in the region forced many activists to redefine their transnational ties towards more economic needs. The paper thus argues that the same revolutionary activists today are agents in the making of a transnational economic space. A political and even revolutionary space thus preludes the transnational remittances economy since the very same channels of transnational relations are still used to transfer remittances today.